by Steven Caron
Last night September 20 about 10 TACo's set up in the Motebello lot. Conditions were fairly worm, not to windy and pretty clear, except for the nasty layer of light pollution blanketing the bay. The transparency was good, although the seeing was just plan crappy. The Ranger came by and said the fog was coming fast over windy hill. Other observers included Jay Freeman, Matthew Marcus, Phil Chambers, Andrew Pierce, Clayton Feldman and Archer Sully all the way from Colorado.
When I got there I found James Turley setting his new 114mm Vixen ED Apo. I decided to set up my 6" acomat next to 41/2 Apo and do a shoot out. It seemed like a pretty fare match. Clayton Feldman's night didn't get off to a good start. The motherboard on his laptop burned up or something of the sort. You could smell the fried circuits all through out the lot. Jay had his C-14 systematically hunting down extremely faint galaxies in Draco.
So, on to the shoot-out. We started by comparing views of some old friends, M22, the Lagoon, M11, M2, NGC 7331, M16, the Dumbbell. I was very impressed with the performance of the Vixen Apo. It gave very sharp images. There was, however some slight astigmatism. We tried out Matthew's 2" Orion Ultra-Block on the Veil, North America, and Helix nebula. The Vixen gave a much wider flat-filed than the 6". The eyepiece was a spectacular 42mm Lanthanum superwides, with a lovely 72 degree apparent filed.
Though out the night the fog crept in very slowly. Around 11:30 the wind started to pick up a lot, and the fog started to eat up Sagittarius and the Milky Way. Then while James and I were comparing our final object, M103, someone shouted "There Gone! There Gone!!" In mater of 5 seconds the fog covered the sky completely. I went a way shortly, and it was unusually still. We were in the eye of the storm. Soon enough the fog hit us and hit us hard. The wind packed up and blew my table over. "It's time to pack it up" I thought. Visibility was reduced to 5 feet, you couldn't even see the people on the opposite side of the lot. The fog hesitated, hesitated and finally moved in, very typical for Montelbello. Jay sensed what was coming and packed up early.
All in all it was a decent night, despite the awful seeing. I had a great time comparing view's between the Vixen Apo and my 6". I logged one new object; NGC 6629, a planetary in Sagittarius. A very fun night....